


Fade Swiftly Into Color

by worldaccordingtofangirls



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Angst, M/M, eleanor is barely there at all she's just mentioned, idk this is a strange fic it just sort of happened alright, or something
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-27
Updated: 2015-06-27
Packaged: 2018-04-06 12:34:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4221924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/worldaccordingtofangirls/pseuds/worldaccordingtofangirls
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He looks at him, sometimes, with something dying on his lips, because he knows Harry has to eat and he doesn’t want to bring anything different into the careful safety that has been strung between them. Maybe it’s because he feels that in it there is some sort of promise. Maybe.</p>
<p>[Louis owns a bar. Harry gets lost there. Things have a way of falling into each other that way.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fade Swiftly Into Color

**Author's Note:**

> **HELLO:** Warnings for mentions of **violence** and **sexual abuse**. Basically, it's implied that Harry has sex with guys who sometimes beat him up. Nothing graphic, but very heavy mentions. Take care of yourselves. Thanks for reading!

He wishes he could hold things down in places forever. It’s not that he doesn’t appreciate change, because he does; he deeply appreciates its strength, almost admires it. He would outright admire it if he liked powerful things but he doesn’t, not at all, doesn’t think anyone really does. And sometimes he thinks that he maybe even loves change because he lives his life with nostalgia foaming off the top of every thought, of everything he does. Maybe he does love change, but if that’s true then he knows that he also wants to take things, drill down inside of them to their essence, and spin that into something he can hold in his hands. He wants to know how to let things go but he also wants to weave things into places and be always reminded that no matter what it was a part of him, has been, never won’t be. 

It’s really just that, nothing more. He doesn’t want everything to always be the same. He just wishes things didn’t have to go, and when they do go, he just likes the reminder. He wants to squeeze things that don’t even exist into the floorboards and the ceilings. Into the space between his bed and the wall. Into the dripping taps that he keeps meaning to fix because it’s costing the bar too much to waste like that. He knows there is beauty in change but – well, maybe that’s just it. 

He hasn’t been writing much since Eleanor packed up the last of her things. Or he has been writing but it hasn’t been things that belong to him. Even his shopping lists seem like they’re for someone else’s milk and eggs, someone else’s bread, to the point where cooking feels strange, like he’s inhabiting a different world, a place he never knew existed and isn’t completely allowed to explore. It doesn’t mean he misses her. Or he misses her, but he misses the way they used to be, the easy intimacy that has long passed between them. She still drops by the bar every now and then, and he’s glad to see her, but he knows there’s no use reaching out, no use trying to reimagine whatever used to exist in the atomic interval between their skin, and he can see in her eyes, in the careful stay of her hand on his elbow, the brush of her lips against his cheek, that she knows it, too. It’s not bitter. It’s just gone.

Maybe it’s in beginning times that feel like this, like waking up in the morning and not remembering what’s wrong or right in the world for the first few minutes as you get your bearings, maybe it’s in beginning times that the words don’t quite come to him like they do at the end of a narrative. Maybe that’s why what he wants to say has to take on different shapes, vessels that don’t belong to him. He doesn’t understand the currents of meaning shifting beneath his skin so he pours them into something else, someone else’s story, someone else’s smile and laugh, the whispers shredded on someone else’s pillow.

It’s not bad. And it’s in times like these that the bar comes through for him, gives him the best stories that belong to other people to tell. 

Like -- well, like the one he will remember as one of the first cool, wet days of that autumn, the one he will remember as the kind of fragile thing that you never want to apply too much pressure to, years later, threading it back through his hair and his skin, feeling it breathe beneath him, the body of it seeking him, him seeking back, like always, that’s love, isn’t it.

He’s pouring a drink when the kid walks in. And he means it, a kid -- he can’t be more than eighteen or nineteen, and when Louis first looks at him he thinks about glass, the crunch of it under his shoe. The light in his face, the living pull of it, will come later. 

He hands the drink off and turns back to his work. It’s only later in the night, with a light rain drumming just below the pulse of the music, that he thinks about him again. It’s because he glances across the bar and sees him standing on the far side standing with his face pulled white and fragile, and it’s because in the few spaces where there is color in his skin there is too much, and his mouth and eyes are bright, lurid. Drunk and a little bit scared. Another man is talking at him, laughing, nudging his body forward; he has hair on his arms, moves with a tense eagerness that betrays shame, and rests a hand on the kid’s waist. 

Louis looks down at the surface of the bar, dulled with fingerprints and spilled drinks, and thinks about how he’ll polish it tomorrow. It’s not his job. An hour later, the kid leaves with the man and Louis shuts down the bar for the night. It can’t be his job. 

He doesn’t need much sleep, and he builds his routine around that. Falls into bed around three or four in the morning, falls awake at eight or nine, easy as breathing. He’s not bothered by much. He creaks around the attic above the bar, swirling milk into his tea; then he sits over a notebook, writing whatever comes to him. Sometimes it fits, sometimes it doesn’t. He has more and more time for that now. He used to have a second job but he really doesn’t need much and doesn’t ever want to retire, can’t imagine it, so he quit. Eleanor liked the attic anyway. Never bothered him to rent a real flat. Sometimes he thinks about the long brown line of her stretched over his pillows, the deep bow of her lips; the way her laughter shook up the sunlight that fell through the dust, broke it into pieces. 

She was good to him, so good. He was good to her, too. Sometimes he runs his hands over the sheets and wonders if parts of them are in there. 

Things slip, like late morning into afternoon; by then he’s sweeping the bar, setting the bottles right on the shelves, doing repairs or whatever else needs doing. Calling his mum and sisters, getting the groceries. A quick run with the wan autumn sunlight like a sheet of paper on his skin. Sometimes he goes out with his friends, and sometimes he doesn’t want to see anyone, just wants to sit in the not quite twilight that comes into being right before the bar opens and let the lyrics flow softly to and from a series of points on his body that he can’t quite pin down. 

It’s not until weeks after the first time he shows up that they talk. The kid has been coming around about every other day, cheeks flushed from the cold, the points of his body standing out too sharply against the thin shirts and sweaters that he tugs at, sometimes, when nobody is looking. It’s in moments like that when the anxiety of being young still clings to his skin in places, though it has flaked away in large patches, the glint of his eyes and the twist of his mouth which breathes slowly and with a female fullness. Louis doesn’t have to talk to him to see the kind of life he carries on the small yoke of his shoulders. When he smiles there is a slippery texture to it. 

Louis doesn’t like watching it, but the kid has a way with making men shell shit out for him, drinks as glaring as the color that rises in his cheeks after five shots, one after the other until Louis starts making mixed drinks without putting any vodka in at all, but nobody notices that it’s just grenadine. It’s why they don’t talk, because the kid never has to order for himself. It’s only when he stumbles against the bar and Louis can see the far corner dig into his side, see his face move to contort in pain only to pause, reevaluate, and slide into a smile for the guy looming over him, who is laughing and holding his arm and red in the face and pressing down with his fingertips, it’s only then that their eyes even meet, only then that something passes between them. 

Like always, he leaves with the guy, but when Louis is wiping down the counter he hears someone tap on the door and when he looks up he sees him again. It’s like at first he doesn’t recognize him, and then with a certain electricity the contours of his face become familiar again. There he is with his hair dark from the rain, his eyes blown wide, the sheen of them thick and wet; the water curls down his face, and it looks like it might pool in the hollows of his cheekbones were it not for gravity, which draws it down instead to wear it disappears against the skin of his neck. That’s all there is. And no color, no color, except for where blood rises from the corner of his mouth through which he is still breathing slowly, with a deliberation that throws itself into contrast with the rest of his being. 

Louis lets him in, lets him sit at one of the barstools, pours him some cheap scotch on the rocks even though he’s sure he can’t pay for it. Come to think of it, he’s not even sure if the kid’s of age; it’s never been him buying the drinks. He watches as he downs the scotch in two huge swallows that emerge like punctuation marks in the path of his throat. When he’s done he looks at Louis but doesn’t look at him, his eyes skittering over his face, the walls of the bar, his own hands. 

“Can I stay here, please,” he says. It’s something that is beyond his years. Hoarse and broken now but it still rolls like tires over gravel. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t seem very drunk,” says Louis, because it’s true. 

The kid’s mouth stretches. Is he smiling? There is a cavernous dimple near where his cheeks cut lines in his face. 

“I’m not. Never am.” 

“Don’t you have a room at uni or something?” 

The kid shakes his head.

“Don’t go to uni.” 

Louis doesn’t ask; he already knows. Takes the glass from the kid’s too large hand, runs water over it for a second, and turns it over in the sink. 

“Me neither. Dropped out.” 

“Oh. Why?” 

“Hated it.” Louis runs water over the glass, dries it, and slides it back on the shelf. “Got a job at this place. Owner died, left it to me. It was stupid. I got lucky.” 

“Oh.” 

“What’s your name?” 

“Harry.” 

“How old are you?” 

Harry sucks his lower lip into his mouth. The blood is drying there. 

“Nineteen.” 

“Are you telling me the truth?” 

“Yes.”

Louis fills his lungs with air and lets it out. 

“Okay.” 

He wets a rag -- it’s far from clean, stiff with alcohol and never washed enough in the first place, but it will do -- and gives it to Harry to wipe off the blood; not wanting to watch the shadow play of his hand on his face, he goes up to the apartment and brings down some Neosporin, handing it to Harry, who thanks him quietly. 

Louis leans his elbows against the bar.

“How’d it happen?” 

“Rings,” says Harry, with a grimace that pulls the cut harder, coaxes a fresh pearl of blood to the surface. “Fuck.” 

Louis likes it, though, that he doesn’t lie, doesn’t try to say that he cut himself shaving or something like that. He likes it that it’s okay for things to just be known. He’s never understood why people try so hard to avoid truths. Or he understands it, but he thinks it’s silly -- just putting off the inevitable, making it harder for people to sort themselves out at the end of things. He liked that about Eleanor, too, the way she put her hand in his hair and held him close in a way that seemed honest, and how she said whatever she meant to say at least as far as he knew. Even when it came to the softness of the end, she never stopped; she didn’t pretend it was something else, just looked him in the eyes and said they didn’t love each other anymore, and maybe they never had, and that she knew, and she said this all with a frankness with which he couldn’t disagree. 

He tries to let things be known to himself, too, and as he takes Harry up the stairs, says that he can have the bed, turns away as he peels the wet clothing from his skin and takes it to the bathroom to dry, he stops telling himself that it’s a one-time thing. It doesn’t have so much to do with Louis as it does with Harry needing it again. He looks natural in a strange bed, comfortable in a way that dries Louis’s mouth with sadness, but he is relieved that his shoulders rising from the sheets are pale and clean at least, still frozen in some sort of lost right time. But then again he falls asleep so quickly. 

Louis goes to draw some blankets over the couch. 

For a long time, he thinks Harry will be gone when he wakes up. It takes him a while to stop expecting it. Louis doesn’t know why he stays, but he stays, usually to nine or ten in the morning. He’s sleeping in, most of the time, breathing what only seems to be more exhaustion into his frame, but sometimes he cleans or fixes the bed, and once Louis even found him in the kitchen, cooking eggs, humming something low under his breath as he shakes pepper into the pan. It’s not so much a friendship that develops between them as it is a mutual betweenness, like a certain understanding fuels the way their bodies move around each other, like the negative space that begins at Louis’ fingertips and ends at Harry’s is always precisely mapped and charted. 

They don’t talk much. Sometimes Louis notices a new bruise or bump on Harry’s cheek, his shoulder, and every now and then his thigh, where he guesses there are probably more but just shadows, ghost impressions on his skin. He’ll ask him where he got it, and Harry will always answer honestly, sometimes laughing -- the chain on his wrist, can you believe? A grown man with a charm bracelet. Who would’ve thought. And the thing about his face is that it expands when he laughs, and there is something nervously brilliant about the shifting dimensions of his bones in those moments, cracking open like blinds in the morning. Louis feels like there is an understanding there that he has not quite reached.

He looks at him, sometimes, with something dying on his lips, because he knows Harry has to eat and he doesn’t want to bring anything different into the careful safety that has been strung between them. Maybe it’s because he feels that in it there is some sort of promise. Maybe.

He finds money, sometimes, left under the pillow or on the kitchen counter. He leaves it there until Harry gets the message. And he doesn’t keep an eye on him at the bar per se, but he starts to notice what kind of jewelry his customers are wearing, wondering whose watch or class ring will leave its mark for him to laugh at later on. It’s not his job. But sometimes Harry leaves him eggs after he makes breakfast, and even if they’re cold and congealed by the time Louis finds them, they’re bright yellow, and so he thinks about it, he thinks about it. 

He likes a lot of things about hindsight, but maybe his favorite is being able to pinpoint the exact moment when things change. It’s really only possible in retrospect; in the thick of things you almost never feel it, the seismic shift in the ground under you, one plate grating back, the other crumbling forwards. Sometimes it’s not even there. Like with Eleanor, the stopping loving was slow, free of climax, and indefinite. Like one color slipping slowly into another. One day it was and then it took a long time of becoming until it wasn’t. That’s okay, too. That was nice, and it felt like it belonged to them. But he likes it better when there’s a moment. A moment lends itself better to words. A kind of music in and of itself. 

And here, even with the moments that feel too delicate, like the pieces of sun that exist in between the dust motes, too improbable, even when Louis is putting it all together and his hands feel intimately clumsy and he’s worried about pressing too hard, even when he sits at the edge of the bed and decides to just miss things for hours on end, even when times are like that -- here, even then, he knows the beat.

It is soft, and slow, and rhythmic. Like breathing. 

He can’t sleep. He’s at the bar writing. He’s nursing a beer and he keeps just one lamp on, stretching himself out in its glow. It’s later than usual. He writes and the words still feel strange, ballooned out beyond his person. And he feels like he is grasping at them but his fingers only scrape against their confines which shy elastically away from him. Trying to draw them back to himself but he can’t. It’s not a bad feeling, but it’s been going on for so long that he’s getting tired of it. The knock on the glass is faint, so faint. It’s Harry. 

Louis looks at him. It’s a stark picture. He’s gripping at his shoulder like there’s no tomorrow. And his mouth pulls down at one corner like he can’t control it and his gaze is dashed in pieces. It can’t quite focus. His right eye is blooming. Stark. Louis wrenches at the door, feels it grind towards him interminably, the rush of cool air -- it has become autumn -- and then Harry lurches like the earth has reared up underneath his feet. 

“Jesus.” Louis catches him at his side. It’s not the first time they’ve touched, but there is a new intimacy to this, an intimacy that will be with him for he doesn’t know how long. Maybe forever. Harry’s body gives a sharp and large and unbalanced impression against him, and he feels the betweenness like a breaking bone. “It’s late.” 

“I was sure you wouldn’t be here.” A single sob. Dry and lost in Louis’ neck. “I just came by, but I was sure you would be asleep. I just came by.” 

He’s bleeding hard from his arm, and the skin of his neck is livid with bruises. Louis swears and for the first time they share steps on the stairs because Harry is leaning against him, his breath catching in ragged strokes, and Louis feels like his body is the stretched tight surface of a drum. In the bathroom, Harry takes his jacket off, but he cries out when he has to lift his shirt over his head. It stretches his muscles in a bad way, so Louis does it, feeling like his hands are tangled in the fabric and wishing he has something better than rubbing alcohol. He cleans the cut with warm water first. When the ethanol bites into his skin Harry only sobs once from the pain, but it’s deep and Louis feels it begin to belong in his bones. 

Ah, he realizes it dimly – so that’s how it will be. 

He looks at the ridges where Harry’s skin splits in two. Maybe it needs stitches. He doesn’t know. Harry’s not going to any hospital, that’s for sure. He gives him a rag and then he looks at Harry’s face in the mirror. The lopsided sway of it. The glimmer of baby fat at his chin. The suggestion of dimples in his cheeks, which fall dimensionless over his bones. The looming flower of his eye. And then he looks away. At the tile. At his own feet. His soap in the dish. The brown mold spreading, slowly and anciently, from the edges of the ceiling. He knows, even then. He knows. 

“Live here. There’s another room. I’ll clean it out.” Louis doesn’t surprise himself, exactly, but he wasn’t sure it was coming. He wasn’t sure what he was going to decide. “It’s not charity. You can work for me. At the bar. Work at the bar.” 

He sees in the mirror that Harry is looking at him. 

“You don’t have to help me.” It’s not really hostile. He’s being factual. “I’m okay.”

“I know,” says Louis. “Work at the bar.” 

Harry’s fingers are fisted in the rag, squeezing it; the drop of water that spreads down his arm is rosy, like the first breath of sunrise at the horizon of his skin.

“Alright,” he says, without checking that Louis is sure. 

He’s is still sleeping when Louis goes to clean out the old boxes.

And he sleeps for most of the next day, too. Like there is some deep old repair going on in his bones. It’s only around six o’clock that Louis heads up the stairs, wanting to finish emptying the other room, and finds him at the hob. He’s shirtless, and the long strike of his skin reminds Louis remembers that the clothes he left crumpled on the bathroom floor must be touched with blood and rain and sweat, too. 

“You can borrow something of mine,” he says. Harry looks up. The bruise at his eye is dulled, wilted at the corners, which Louis almost expects to crackle and lift up from his skin, peeling away. “To wear. For now, of course. Do you have things?” 

Harry shrugs. 

“A few.” There is something different in his voice, sleepy and slow. “Some clothes, a couple of books. An iPod and headphones. It’s at my sister’s place right now. I’ll go get it tomorrow, if that’s okay.” 

“Yeah, that’s fine.” Louis feels suddenly aimless. The shape of the space between him and Harry feels fluid, like his body presses in on it whenever he moves, cushioned and reductive, like it somehow flows out to meet him and shrinks all at the same time. He goes to sit at the edge of the bed. “You have a sister?”

Harry nods, looks up to meet Louis’ eyes; he knows what’s really being asked. 

“She goes to the uni nearby. I sleep there sometimes, but I can’t live in her dorm, you know? Against policy or something. And besides.” The pan hisses and he looks away again. “She doesn’t know everything. About how bad it is.” 

Another thing Louis likes, that he doesn’t shy away from the word. Bad, it’s bad. The blooming of his eye, the clumsy bandaging of his shoulder. The sweat, another man’s, mixed in with the blood and the rain. Bad, without stopping on the word, without pausing to consider its weight, its contours. Bad. Things are bad for Harry.

And he is there. Just woken up, the marks of Louis’s sheets still dug into his skin, and framed against the open kitchen window where the sunset hasn’t started yet. And yet somehow Louis knows that when it does it will clamp down all at once. The kind where the colors soak the walls of his flat and he can almost see them as being there always. And he will never be sure if he feels it then, too, but Harry reaches for two plates and divides up the eggs and hands one of the plates to him. Then he sits backwards on one of the kitchen chairs so that he can look at Louis from where he’s sitting on the edge of the bed staring at the eggs in his lap. Harry takes the first bite. 

“You need to go grocery shopping,” he says with his mouth full. “Haven’t got shit in the kitchen.”

“Mm,” says Louis around his fork. “Write me a list.” 

And Harry does.

**Author's Note:**

> i can't believe i wrote fanfiction again it's been years and larry no less anyway thanks for reading love y'all lots


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